Insights into how users behave within a website or domain are extremely important in informing business decisions. For example, having insight on what pages or sections are visited most frequently can be used not just to create better user models, but also to improve the design of such pages and the overall “flow” of the website (e.g., by highlighting certain sections on particular page layouts).
Certain online services, such as Flickr, have become rich resources for research in multimedia. While a lot is known about the data that resides at such online services, there are not that many insights into how people actually use the services, and in particular, their social navigation patterns.
As the functionality of the web has become more complex, sharing content (e.g., photos, comments, documents, etc.) is accomplished in many more ways. For example, people frequently share photos through social networks, blogs, and news articles, etc. Accordingly, it is increasingly more difficult to understand the dynamics of how users browse and consume content.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.